“Sounds delicious.”
“Feel free to have one.”
“I tell you what, since you refuse to reveal anything that might make my job even a smidgeon easier, how about I make a delicious prosciutto sandwich and taunt you with it until you tell me what I want to know?”
Saiman laughed.
An eerie sound came from the living room—a light click, as if something with long sharp claws crawled across metal.
I put my finger to my lips, freed my saber, and padded out into the living room.
The room lay empty. No intruders.
I stood very still, trying to fade into the black walls.
Moments dripped by.
A small noise came from the left. It was a hesitant, slow clicking, as if some creature slunk in the distance, slowly putting one foot before the other.
Click.
Definitely a claw.
Click.
I scrutinized the left side of the room. Nothing moved.
Click. Click, click.
Closer this time. Fear skittered down my spine. Fear was good. It would keep me sharp. I kept still. Where are you, you sonovabitch?
Click to the right, and almost immediately a quiet snort to the left. Now we had two invisible intruders. Because one wasn’t hard enough.
An odd scent nipped at my nostrils, a thick, slightly bitter herbal odor. I’d smelled it once before, but I had no clue where or when.
Claws scraped to the right and to the left of me now. More than two. A quiet snort to the right. Another in the corner. Come out to play. Come on, beastie.
Claws raked metal directly in front of me. There was nothing there but that huge window and sloping ceiling above it. I looked up. Glowing green eyes peered at me through the grate of the air duct in the ceiling.
Shivers sparked down my back.
The eyes stared at me, heated with madness.
The screws in the air duct cover turned to the left. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. Smart critter.
The grate fell onto the soft carpet. The creature leaned forward slowly, showing me a long conical head. The herbal scent grew stronger now, as if I’d taken a handful of absinthe wormwood and stuck it up my nose.
Long black claws clutched the edge of the air duct. The beast rocked, revealing its shoulders sheathed in shaggy, hunter green fur.
Bingo. An endar. Six legs, each armed with wicked black claws; preternaturally fast; equipped with an outstanding sense of smell and a big mouth, which hid a tongue lined with hundreds of serrated teeth. One lick and it would scrape the flesh off my bones in a very literal way.
The endars were peaceful creatures. The green fur wasn’t fur at all; it was moss that grew from their skin. They lived underneath old oaks, rooted to the big trees in a state of quiet hibernation, absorbing their nutrients and making rare excursions to the surface to lick the bark and feed on lichens. They stirred from their rest so rarely that pagan Slavs thought they fed on air.
Someone had poured blood under this endar’s oak. The creature had absorbed it, and the blood had driven it crazy. It had burrowed to the surface, where it swarmed with its fellows. Then the same someone, armed with a hell of a lot of magic, had herded this endar and its buddies to this high-rise and released them into the ventilation system so they would find Saiman and rip him apart. They couldn’t be frightened off. They couldn’t be stopped. They would kill anything with a pulse to get to their target, and when the target was dead, they would have to be eliminated. There was no going back from endar madness.
Only a handful of people knew how to control endars.
Saiman had managed to piss off the Russians. It’s never good to piss off the Russians. That was just basic common sense. My father was Russian, but I doubted they would cut me any slack just because I could understand their curses.